[intro]If you find that your Obodo shop is running slowly, this Guide will detail the steps you need to take to determine the cause and rectify the issue.[/intro]

There may be occasions that you notice that your Obodo shop is running slowly. This can be for a variety of reasons and this Guide will take you through the steps you must follow to identify the cause of the issue and rectify it. It is also worth checking the content of your Obodo shop regularly to ensure that it loads quickly and improves your customer's shopping experience.

[tips]Before you begin, you need to be aware that to accurately test your Obodo shop, you need to make a note of what action that you’re trying to do at the point where you have noticed that the speed changes. If it’s a customer that has contacted you about this issue, find out from them what kind of device they were using and what they were trying to do at the time so you can attempt to replicate their steps. [/tips]

1. Check your Browser

The first step you need to take is to identify if there’s an issue with the browser that you’re using. The easiest way to do this is to open another browser on your computer and use this to return to your Obodo shop and repeat the action that made the shop operate slowly. If using the second browser does not make the shop run slowly, your next step is to clear the cache on your primary browser. Remember that clearing your history is not the same as clearing your cache! 

You can do this by clicking on one of the Guides below:

  • Google Chrome
  • Internet Explorer
  • Edge
  • Safari
  • Firefox

2. Check computer

If you have cleared the cache on your browsers and your Obodo shop is still operating slowly, your next step is to completely restart your computer. This is because updates to your computer or browser may be required and if this is the case, you will be prompted to allow this during the process of restarting. 

3. Check internet connection

When your computer has restarted, open your browser and log back into your Obodo shop. If your shop is still running slowly, your next step is to check your internet connection. The strength of your internet connection depends on lots of different factors, including your location, the kind of service you have paid for from your Internet Service Provider (ISP), the kind of devices you are using, the kind of connection you have and the number of people in the building that are online too. Your ISP should be able to help you check the status of your internet connection and advise you if there are any issues that require your attention.

4. Pingdom Tools

If you are confident that your internet connection is not the cause of the issue, your next step is to check the content of your Obodo shop. You can do this by using Pingdom Tools, which will run a speed test and from the results, you can ascertain if there’s any content that could be slowing your shop down. 

[remember]As your Obodo shop is on a hosted platform (which means we’ve built the platform for you), not all information garnered from Pingdom Tools will be applicable to you. This is because Pingdom Tools can be used with lots of different kinds of websites, including blogs, online shops and custom sites built from scratch.[/remember]

1. Click this link, then you need to add your primary domain name into the field provided and select ‘Europe - United Kingdom - London’ from the Test From drop-down menu, before clicking the green Start Test button:

2. When the test has been completed, the report looks like this:

3. Scroll down the page until you see this breakdown of your content. The simplest way to translate this is to look in the top left-hand corner in the ‘Content Size by Content Type’ table. In this example, it’s images that are slowing this Obodo shop down:

5. Scroll further down the page, until you see this table. Click through the different pages of the table and look for long stripes of colour:

[remember]Some of the content of your Obodo shop which may be highlighted in your speed test is essential for it to operate. You cannot rectify this, but you can review any content on your Obodo shop - such as images or third party code - in order to make your shop perform at a faster speed. [/remember]

6. As you click through the different pages of the table, look for the long stripes of colour next to the image symbol - these are the images on your Obodo shop which are slowing things down. Click the name of the image to see more information about the image, and more importantly, a thumbnail of the image so you can easily identify it:

7. As you are working through the table, make a note of which of your images are slowing down your Obodo shop. When you have been through the table and listed these problematic images, the next step is to improve them. Images which take a long time to load have not been optimised; the image file itself is very large and optimising it will remove any superfluous data (without affecting the quality of the image) and improve it’s loading speed.

[tips]On the Obodo shop platform, it is only Design Images that will need optimising; Product and Category Images are optimised by the platform automatically. If you have used Image Builder to create your Design Images, you will need to download these and optimise them before uploading them back onto your Obodo shop. This is because images created this way are saved as layers, which allows you to edit them again at a later date. However, to improve their loading speed, it is essential to optimise the image and use the optimised version instead of the Image Builder version on your Obodo shop. [/tips] 

8. To do this, you will need to use TinyPng. Download the relevant images from your Obodo shop, and then upload up to 20 images at a time to TinyPng by dropping them in the box at the top of the page:

9. When TinyPng has optimised your Design Images, you’ll see a summary of your files and how much they have been compressed. Click the Download All button:

10. Your optimised Design Images will now be in a zipped file in the download folder on your computer. You then need to add these Design Images to your File Manager and assign them to the relevant Elements of your Theme, replacing the non-optimised versions. When you have completed this process, this should have rectified the speed of your Obodo shop. You can test this by doing another speed test using Pingdom Tools. 

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[contact]If you need our help with your Obodo shop, contact our Customer Support Team, who will be able to point you in the right direction. We're open from 8am-6pm weekdays and 9am-5.30pm on the weekends. If you have a non-account specific question ask the Obodo Team, join us in the Obodo Community on Facebook. [/contact]